The technology blog of Neil Thompson

Pebble have slowly been making good on all that was promised when the watch was announced on Kickstarter. This week saw the launch of RunKeeper integration, as you can see from the image below.

It is incredibly easy to use mainly because there aren’t options whatsoever. When you start an activity the details (time, distance and pace) are all clearly displayed on the watch. The centre button allows you to pause and resume the recording, which is useful, but that’s the lot. It works well.

Since delivering the watches the team at Pebble have been steadily delivering on a number of promises. Firstly we got a couple of updates to the software that has greatly improved the stability. The annoying “permission to connect” message on iOS while not entirely eliminated has been drastically reduced.

Next came the SDK and custom watch faces of which there are a number of great ones at http://www.mypebblefaces.com. However, the watch seems to only be able to store ten faces. Not sure if this is related to the memory of the watch, so would also affect capacity for apps, or just a limit imposed by Pebble.

Now we have the first of the third party apps. I’m now looking forward to some interesting integrations as the SDK matures.

It’s still not perfect, I have had the watch crash a couple of times (but then my desktop does that too!). The largest font is way too small for my eyesight and the CLI doesn’t ever seem to work but given how Pebble have responded to date I think that we can be confident that they will get there in the end.